The teams we worked with are relatively new to Agile and the distributed version of it, so there is a huge potential for using a variety of media and a lot of experimentation with various tools (it was hard to get an overview since teams were quite autonomous in what they tried and kept working with). That’s said there is not that much use of various activity streams (I’d put blogging in there too) and the degree of using presence/IM/audio/video conferencing tools outside of scheduled interactions varies a lot between teams and people within them. Lots of potential and lots of questions here (will blog on it soon!)

F2f is praised and has lots of opportunities for informal interactions and building a common ground, but resources for it are limited, so, for example, not everyone in a team have met each other in person. I guess part of the equation is how do you add things next to f2f.

A few questions (please leave a link if you already covered these topics)

1) In your case study and research what media do you include? Members of our team use: Traction TeamPage (integrated weblog, wiki, liveblog, email digest and email/jabber notification, activity stream, rss feed); iChat video + audio + jabber; Mercurial for source code. Full disclosure: Our team is Traction Software and we’ve historically bootstrapped all of our own engineering and other work using our own product.

2) Team members get together face to face on an irregular basis (visits or meetings) which generally have a broad topical purpose, but lots of uncommitted time for discussion and socializing (we all like good food!). What patterns of face to face meetings do you see?

3) Always on iChat audio video and liveblog + jabber + email notification don’t replace F2F but seem to be very successful in balancing folk’s ability to

a) Work without distraction – politely defer a non-urgent question or discussion

b) See what’s going on (livebloging status and requesting time for a non-urgent follow on question or discussion)

c) Ask a relatively urgent question (Jabber)

d) Open a Video or jabber chat.

The social norm seems to be a general acceptance of a polite request to defer or set a time for a question or discussion, often using the shared liveblog space so that all other folk are aware of this discussion and can join in later, offer help, etc.

4) I find that different folk have different preferences for doing a tatus scan and getting notifications, for example:

I prefer RSS feeds from all internal TeamPage and external sources (about 400) refreshing every two hours + an always on liveblog window for awareness.

Others prefer to get email digests of all activity + email notifications on new items or conversations of interest + a liveblog window

Others prefer an activity view of all new / edit / tag / moderation TeamPage actions for summary on demand + a liveblog window.

Mercurial source code checking notices are posted to a TeamPage space and are reflected in the rss feed, notifications, or activity view. A shared liveblog window seems to be the common channel for coordination and response using other media.